Experience the best of Qaqortoq

Qaqortoq climbs a rocky slope above a harbour in South Greenland, its wooden houses painted red, blue and yellow. The Danes founded the settlement in the 1770s, and it remains the largest town in the south. A fountain of 1932 in the main square has whales spouting water, and around town, Stone and Man, an open-air project in which sculptors carved faces and figures into the rock in the early 1990s, turns the cliffs into a gallery.

The local museum, in a building from the early nineteenth century, tells of Greenlandic and Norse history. A short boat ride leads to Hvalsey, the best-preserved Norse ruins in Greenland, where the walls of a stone church still stand; a wedding there in 1408 is the last written record of the Norse settlers. Erik the Red's farm at Qassiarsuk, the hot springs on Uunartoq island and the ice cap near Narsarsuaq are all further afield in the south.

Lamb from the sheep farms of South Greenland, halibut, prawns and dried fish are typical foods, and reindeer, seal and whale appear on some menus. Summer brings long light and mild days, whales in the fjords, and in autumn the northern lights return.